Becoming Divine : Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion

To what extent has the emergence of the study of religion in western culture been gendered? This work proposes a new philosophy of religion from a feminist perspective. Starting with Luce Irigaray's discussion of Divine Women, she contrasts the idea of "becoming divine" with the more traditional aim of investigating the coherence and truth of theistic doctrines. She goes on to discuss religious language and the unconcious, drawing on the work of Derrida and Levinas, and so asks the fundamental question of what constitutes religion and religions. Building on the work of a number of French feminist philosophers, she then explores the possibility of developing a new imaginary religon, one that would replace the rigid structures of the masculinist symbolic and move towards feministy pantheism.